Robert Berold reviews Zhu Wen’s ‘I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China’
I LOVE DOLLARS AND OTHER STORIES OF CHINA
Zhu Wen
(Julia Lovell, trans.)
Penguin, 2008
I Love Dollars, a book of long short stories by a young electrical engineer named Zhu Wen, was published in 1994. Some 15 years before that, Deng Xiaoping had opened up the Chinese economy to market forces, with his famous justification: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat” (terms and conditions: as long as the cat’s owner is the Party and the Party is never expected to loosen its grip on power). Communist principles fell by the wayside, as did trade unions, minimum wages, free education and medical care, but it worked: China soon became the factory of the world. Writers and intellectuals were for sale too, according to the narrator of the title story:
… keep the dollars flying at [me] and inspiration will never dry up; poverty is far more corrupting than money. I respect my forebears, but those long-suffering earlier generations of writers who weren’t interested in money or sleeping with more than a dozen women doomed themselves to mediocrity… my generation is different: greedy for everything, everywhere, smashing, grabbing, swearing.
In this story, a young writer’s father, a widower, comes to visit his two sons in a provincial city where everyone appears to be suspicious, mistrusting and hustling. Nevertheless a son’s respect for his father remains a primary Chinese virtue. Even the cynical narrator believes this, although his understanding of filial care means finding a prostitute for his reluctant father for a night (it doesn’t actually happen, because the son refuses to pay her fee). As with most of the stories in the book, this one ends arbitrarily when the writer runs out of nervous energy. But it doesn’t matter because the story is visceral and funny, like a Chinese version of Celine.
The story ‘A hospital night’ crosses this boundary, trashing the taboo against insulting the father. Li, the father of the girlfriend of the writer, is in hospital recovering from an operation. He’s erratic and bad-tempered himself, but someone has to stay in the small ward to look after him – the hospital staff don’t seem to do that. To ingratiate himself with his girlfriend, the unpleasant narrator agrees to do a single night’s shift. He attends to the needs of Li’s leaking and disintegrating body (lots of room for lavatorial humour here) but torments him by refusing to give him any water. The old man tries lots of tricks to get some water, to manipulate his sadistic caregiver, but is tormented in turn, ending up with … actually I won’t tell the story, it’s too disgusting. Towards the morning, after much grovelling, with bets being placed by the other ailing inmates, the old man gets a single mug of water:
He finished the mug in seconds. The final mouthful he didn’t swallow right away but instead gargled it over and over, wanting – perfectly understandably I thought – to enjoy to the full this last mouthful of nectar. I picked up the towel hanging at the foot of the bed, intending to wipe his mouth. It was then that I spotted his eyes shift with fiendish sneakiness, it was then that I knew he was up to no good, that I’d been had. Again! Fuck, again! But it was already too late. That last, fateful mouthful of water, laden with a whole nightful of Li’s accumulated rage, sprayed all over my face.
It’s six-year-old slapstick humour, but delivered with such tremendous menace and paranoia, and well-timed humour, that it works.
An even greater taboo is political criticism post-Tiananmen Square, and Zhu Wen knows better than to cross that line. But he goes quite far in the story, ‘Ah, Xiao Xie’. Set on the site of a huge power plant being constructed interminably in a remote place, the narrator and his bored fellow engineers spend their days in games of alienation and indifference. Trying to work out how they are ever going to be promoted, they study the manager’s behaviour for clues:
This is how the factory management career ladder seemed to work. One, appoint your manager when he’s close to retirement, to guarantee he goes intensely and thoroughly power-mad during the few years of absolute rule left to him. Two, he starts sacking and reappointing the entire middle-level management to annihilate the ancien regime and ensure absolute personal loyalty to him. Next, he turns into this industrial man of mystery: no one knows where to find him. […] But as soon as someone from a senior administrative department comes on an inspection […] up he pops, out of nowhere, surrounded by his retinue, shaking hands like he wants to dislocate everybody’s wrists, mouthing platitudes like they’re God’s own truth.
The built-in corruption that comes with absolute state power is familiar to us. But in China it’s combined with a manic work ethic that no country can compete with. In every town in Africa, even dusty small towns, Zhu Wen’s generation is to be found: traders prepared to go to the ends of the earth, ahead of the big companies doing deals in mining and oil. Indifferent to the local language and history, they work their seven-day weeks.
This story, and others, features in Chronic Books, the review of books supplement to Chimurenga 16 – The Chimurenga Chronicle (October 2011), a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present. In this issue, through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
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